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Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

hacks.mozilla.org

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Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#71

Post by speedybird »

earthscienceman wrote: post #21
animex wrote: post #13

I've never had Firefox crash. I guess they are reaching for those edge cases on power users who keep a billion tabs open. Maybe I'm missing some sort of productivity hack that involves leaving 100+ tabs open.

I'm going to reply with a comment stolen from a different HN discussion: The fact that people (myself included) have 100s of tabs open is a symptom of just how broken bookmarking is on the modern web. Bookmarks are a miserable way to create a placeholder for your thoughts. It's too static, must be maintained, and generally prone to link rot. I'm a scientist. I open and read 10-20-100 links for a given topic depending…

Bookmarking, history and unloaded tabs are three disjoint systems that all solve the same problem for me, each inadequate for different reasons. The solution to this mess is to unify the three.

Also two of these three, history and bookmarks, are presently bitrotting badly in firefox. Firefox's 'Library' window that shows History and Bookmarks in separate tabs is abysmally neglected.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#72

Post by asadkn »

earthscienceman wrote: post #21
animex wrote: post #13

I've never had Firefox crash. I guess they are reaching for those edge cases on power users who keep a billion tabs open. Maybe I'm missing some sort of productivity hack that involves leaving 100+ tabs open.

I'm going to reply with a comment stolen from a different HN discussion: The fact that people (myself included) have 100s of tabs open is a symptom of just how broken bookmarking is on the modern web. Bookmarks are a miserable way to create a placeholder for your thoughts. It's too static, must be maintained, and generally prone to link rot. I'm a scientist. I open and read 10-20-100 links for a given topic depending…

Same issue. Except multiple short-term projects with hundreds of reference tabs, in multiple windows, ranging from groups that would classify as "mood boards" to research.

I settled for Workona when it launched about 2+ years ago after trying many extensions else like OneTab, SessionBuddy, Toby and so on.

I might start looking for something else again as Workona is getting a bit more, commercialized, but it's fine for now.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#73

Post by evilpie »

vorticalbox wrote: post #52

> trigger the Firefox-internal memory-pressure warning allowing subsystems in the browser to reduce their memory use. If the sub systems can reduce their meneory use why not do that by default?

It's a classic performance/memory tradeoff. There are caches that aren't strictly necessary for the page to work, but throwing them away causes slowdowns.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#74

Post by Macha »

animex wrote: post #13

I've never had Firefox crash. I guess they are reaching for those edge cases on power users who keep a billion tabs open. Maybe I'm missing some sort of productivity hack that involves leaving 100+ tabs open.

My peak is in the high 300s of tabs. It works fine, though I imagine if they were 300 instances of youtube or some webgl game or video calls there might have been more issue.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#75

Post by earthscienceman »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #65
godshatter wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bookmarking systems are completely outdated, but I'm not sure what they should be replaced with. What would help you in this case so you didn't have to worry about losing the tabs if you closed them?

Maybe a sufficiently good implementation of history search could replace the need for bookmarks entirely. Instead of just matching on page titles, match on content as well. Rank results according to relevance and time spent on the page. Or alternately, maybe bookmarks could become an extension of existing tab management features. Something like Chrome's tab groups or the Tree Style Tabs[1] extension for Firefox, but…

These are actually really good ideas, I had never thought of it like this but I like it. History is really all you need in the end. Bookmarks are just a starred version of history, which could easily be included in the matching algorithm you're talking about.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#76

Post by parhamn »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #28
parhamn wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to talk to you! I'm making a browser which already has automated ML tagging and full text search of content (should you enable it) so you don't really need bookmarks to do smart search and recall. We also have a really cool and well indexed snippet tool built in for pieces of information you want to keep and share. Id love to learn more about your use cases, if you're interested reach out to parham@synth.app…

My use case may qualify; I have anywhere from 100 to 1,000+ open tabs across three different devices and four browser instances (three Firefoxes, one Chrome) at the peak. But judging from your website it looks like a full browser (presumably built out of Chromium) and not an extension that can be used in any browser, so, ugh.

Fair enough. The browser is built because we think browsers should do a lot more than just tabs and bookmarks, so it wasn't enough to just add an extension (we have many more features that we wanted a well integrated experience around).

With that said, there are very few limitations to the browser at this point and it will be eventually open source so feel free to reach out as well!

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#77

Post by bogidon »

swang wrote: post #22

What I want implemented.. Chrome/Firefox whatever... is that instead of unloading and reloading when I go back to the tab I want it to export basically an HTML file and when I click back to that tab, I want it to reload the HTML file instead with some notification/marker that it is a "cached" version. There are times where I'll leave a tab in the background that I don't want refreshed but when it gets unloaded, poof,…

I was surprised recently to learn about the back/forward cache (bfcache) [1], a common browser optimization that sort of does what you're describing but stores a more complete snapshot of the page, including the JS heap. I'm not sure if it's used in this new FF feature (the article doesn't give details about the mechanism of unloading).

However the bfcache unsurprisingly causes edge cases in JS-heavy pages/SPAs, and a prevailing solution [2] is for the page to force a reload when it is restored from this cache rather than explicitly handling those edge cases, nullifying the optimization.

[1] https://web.dev/bfcache/

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/a/13123626/14665201

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#78

Post by mikepurvis »

cuu508 wrote: post #15
mikepurvis wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do computers keep getting more and more memory? 640KB should be enough for everyone, if people would just fix whatever is using up all the memory. /s Not all OOM situations are because of a malfunction or leak.

Let's say you want to have a wallpaper on your 1920x1080 desktop. At 24bpp, that's ~6MB right there.

I've added a sarcasm indicator to my post to clear up any confusion. The point is that there are lots of valid reasons to use an unbounded amount of memory, and it's reasonable to expect unbounded-memory-using applications to have mechanisms which free that memory over time without direct user intervention (eg, manually closing a tab).

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#79

Post by NmAmDa »

earthscienceman wrote: post #21
animex wrote: post #13

I've never had Firefox crash. I guess they are reaching for those edge cases on power users who keep a billion tabs open. Maybe I'm missing some sort of productivity hack that involves leaving 100+ tabs open.

I'm going to reply with a comment stolen from a different HN discussion: The fact that people (myself included) have 100s of tabs open is a symptom of just how broken bookmarking is on the modern web. Bookmarks are a miserable way to create a placeholder for your thoughts. It's too static, must be maintained, and generally prone to link rot. I'm a scientist. I open and read 10-20-100 links for a given topic depending…

A reference manager like zotero would help. You can add non-paper references easily also.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#80

Post by gostsamo »

cpeterso wrote: post #40
gostsamo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using a screen reader and FF regularly crashes due to some broken memory management in the accessibility service. If this unloading cleans the memory before it gets critical, I'm all for it.

Do you have any crash report IDs in your Firefox's about:crashes page? I can check whether a Bugzilla bug report has already been filed for those crashes.

I think that the issue is known, but hard to track. It shows with NVDA and heavy web apps like Twitter and Messenger if they are running for some time. I'm posting here some of the crash ids, but it is likely that they are not representative. When the browser starts to clock up, it locks the screen reader as well and I'm not waiting for the crash, but kill the process with extreme prejudice. I'd be glad to help in any other way.

bp-cb27fd07-ad27-49bf-b6c2-9dbbb0211005

bp-96eef135-da51-45a8-a792-d28810211005

bp-184a8916-227c-42c4-8308-6e3c00211005

bp-ba6748d3-2d93-4d84-992e-8cf960211005

bp-8bdfb00f-0e30-4cd3-826c-efb910211005

Here is the Bugzilla ticket: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1572915

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